Insurance Services Office deploys CA-Vantage to maximise e-business efficiencies, reduce costs

Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) has announced that Insurance Services Office, Inc. (ISO), a premier supplier of statistical, actuarial and underwriting information for the property casualty insurance industry, is using CA-Vantage to monitor critical storage resources across its eBusiness environment. By extensively leveraging the solution`s advanced automation, reporting and forecasting capabilities, ISO is proactively managing its overall storage environment, ensuring high availability of IT resources and keeping costs tightly under control.

In addition to supplying information about property and liability risk, ISO provides advisory services to more than 2,900 insurers and reinsures throughout the world. ISO`s private database, which stores more than 2.7 terabytes of information, is one of the largest in the world.

In embarking upon a large-scale effort to make a majority of its offerings available via the Web, the company recognized the importance of being able to automatically monitor diverse storage resources on a 24 x 7 basis, and transition away from outdated and sometimes ineffective manual processes.

ISO sought a cost-effective solution that ensured high availability and effectively reported current and projected conditions from a space management perspective. The solution had to be able to immediately issue alerts whenever pre-established thresholds had been exceeded, and provide forecasting capabilities on usage trends so technicians could react to potential difficulties far in advance.

"CA-Vantage was the best solution for us to manage our distributed storage environment proactively," said Steve White, ISO vice president of information systems services. "It virtually eliminates all the processes we previously had to perform by hand to monitor the consumption utilization of storage. Now we can also perform advanced forecasting to easily determine if there`s upward or downward consumption utilization of resources, or see if it`s a flat line."

After a white paper evaluation process and in-house comparisons of CA-Vantage and competitive alternatives, ISO determined that CA`s solution was more feature-rich and cost-effective. In addition, the ISO technical staff was impressed by CA-Vantage`s ability to integrate seamlessly within ISO`s largely IBM-focused IT environment.

The cross-platform capabilities of CA-Vantage were also important to ISO, which supports Windows NT, OS/2 and Sun Solaris, as well as numerous OS/390 legacy systems and applications. This has allowed ISO to take a more global and heterogeneous view of storage and storage consumption utilization, according to White.

ISO expects CA-Vantage to bring the same levels of storage management functionality to its distributed environment as those it has historically enjoyed with mainframe IT architectures. "We see CA-Vantage as one of the core technologies that will take us closer to mainframe-caliber levels of sophistication and maturity," White said.

Automating management procedures has produced a two-fold reduction in costs for ISO by maintaining IT staff levels and by utilizing existing staff more effectively.

Due to the rapidly changing nature of the insurance services marketplace, maximizing uptime will continue to be an especially important concern for ISO for the near future.